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Article: USEPA's Risk Assessment Practice: Default Assumptions, Uncertainty Factors
- Article from:
- Human and Ecological Risk Assessment
- Article date:
- January 1, 2007
- Author:
CopyrightCopyright Taylor & Francis Ltd. Jan/Feb 2007. Provided by ProQuest LLC. (Hide copyright information)
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INTRODUCTION
The use of assumptions is a part of all human conceptual thinking, as is the use of standard thought procedures that become default approaches. In most discourse, assumptions and defaults are unconscious, unacknowledged, or both. In risk assessment as practiced by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA), defaults are necessary and useful, but their use must be explicitly described and must follow science policy established for the Agency. The recent USEPA Staff Paper on Risk Assessment Principles and Practices outlines the use of default and extrapolation assumptions in its chapter 4. This extended abstract draws from that chapter of the staff paper. Note that the ...